


Tick Tick Boom

by provocative_envy



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Alternate Universe - Superheroes/Superpowers, F/M, Getting Together, Humor, Identity Reveal, Light Angst, Minor Character Death, Organized Crime, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-04
Updated: 2020-07-04
Packaged: 2021-03-04 20:15:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,165
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25022248
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/provocative_envy/pseuds/provocative_envy
Summary: The new intern leaves another squishy little Pokémon stress ball on Marcus’s desk, not that he’s reading into it.
Relationships: Cho Chang/Marcus Flint
Comments: 27
Kudos: 138





	Tick Tick Boom

**Author's Note:**

  * For [thewasabipea](https://archiveofourown.org/users/thewasabipea/gifts).



> this was written for my [ficraiser](https://provocative-envy.tumblr.com/post/620017038370504704/hi-yall-for-the-first-time-in-checks-notes) over on tumblr; thank you so much for the (multiple) donations, @thewasabipea!
> 
> xoxo

* * *

Nepotism.

Favoritism.

Biased, unmitigated, undeniable corruption.

Marcus isn’t gonna do the math, but he’s pretty sure that if he did do the math he’d wind up with enough syllables for a haiku or a sonnet or something. Poetry. Symmetry. He likes that. He’s intimately acquainted with how the world works, with what keeps it turning, with the length (long) and number (large) and tensile strength (remarkable) of all the strings that’ve had to be pulled to get him through high school, and then college, and then the barren, pencil-pushing wasteland full of entry-level cubicles and defunct iMacs and outdated subway maps.

It’s about who you know.

It’s about who your dad is.

* * *

Marcus’s whole job is to give a fuck.

(He doesn’t.)

* * *

“Oh, come _on_ ,” Montague groans, scrubbing at his forehead with the heel of his palm, the remnants of his quarter-life crisis spring break sunburn glowing an almost neon shade of red. Pink. Like a boiled lobster. “The bridge? The _bridge?”_

Marcus props his feet up on his desk, stretching his legs out, tossing around one of the new intern’s squishy little Pokémon stress balls. It’s yellow. Kind of spiky. Not Pikachu. That’s all he’s got.

“Yeah,” he says blankly. The sixty minutes separating four and five o’clock always feel so fucking _endless_. “Traffic’s been brutal lately. We should talk to someone about that. Who’s our traffic guy? Do we have a traffic guy?” He purses his lips, flicking his gaze over to the tastefully, expensively, boringly beige face of his watch. It’s like the hands aren’t even moving. Ticking. Whatever. “Is that a—what’s it called—an _engineering_ problem? We have those. Engineers. Don’t we?”

“No, dipshit,” Montague says, snapping his fingers and gesturing towards the probably unnecessarily huge flat-screen TV mounted to the wall on the far side of the conference room. It’s showing the current scene at the bridge, siren-blaring swarms of SWAT trucks and cop cars and ambulances and unmarked black SUVs—on _national_ news, not local, which seems . . . bad. “I mean the bridge is _down_. It’s literally on fire.”

* * *

Superheroes.

Supervillains.

Super-tax evaders. Super-arrest resistors. Super-responsibility shirkers. 

Marcus has a sixth fucking sense for sniffing out their bullshit, their casual destruction of both public and private property, the irreverent, irreversible damage they do to city infrastructure and city planning and city _reputations_ ; they take out electric grids with their alien laser eyes and they tear down metered parking garages with their roid-rage righteous HGH muscles and they never so much as _leave a note_. No IOUs. No apologies. No comprehensive insurance policies. 

Black Swan is the newest one, the newest superhero, the newest super- _pain in the ass_ —in Marcus’s ass, specifically. She flies. Like a bird. Whips around the tops of skyscrapers, darts in and out of the clouds, emits this crazy loud, painfully piercing screeching noise, almost like a battle cry, before diving down to fight crime and save the day and singlehandedly contribute to _so goddamn much_ of the paperwork Marcus is supposed to do. 

She wears a sleek black leather bodysuit.

And a mask.

* * *

( _Black Swan_ is the name of a movie, too. Obviously. Marcus has seen it. Something about ballet dancers and psychotic breaks and internalized self-loathing and weirdly scary stage makeup. He’s not connecting those dots. He doesn’t fucking feel like it.)

* * *

Marcus adjusts the microphone on his headset, squinting out the tiny insect-splattered helicopter window as they descend over the wreckage of the bridge.

“Fuck _me_ ,” he says, whistling lowly. It’s a shitshow. Twisted cables, crumbling asphalt, warped steel beams and smoke-scarred cement blocks. “What—who did this? What’s the story?”

Montague is tapping furiously at his tablet, nose scrunched up, a comically conspicuous lipstick stain on his over-starched Brooks Brothers shirt collar. “Nothing’s confirmed. Might’ve been an accident.”

“Any casualties?”

“One, yeah.”

Marcus drums his fingers against his knee. Impatient. Agitated. Putting a bridge back together sounds like a lot of fucking overtime. “Anybody important?”

“Uh,” Montague says, doing a double-take. “What kind of question is that?”

“Those assholes at the SDF—”

“Oh, my _god_.”

“—are probably already down there, taking statements, crafting narratives,” Marcus goes on, sweeping his arm out, yanking at the already yanked-up sleeves of his shirt. “We’re gonna sue the shit out of whoever did this, and they’re gonna try to _stop_ us, and if the collateral damage is, like, a lovable celebrity or a biracial lesbian kindergarten teacher with a heart of gold and eighty foster kittens—”

“It is _not_.”

“—then that’s just, like, good for business, you know? Our business. The _city’s_ business.”

Montague sighs, slouching back in his seat. “It was that car salesman. The sketchy dude with the robot hand and the subprime loan scam and all the commercials.”

“That Peter Piper guy?”

“Pettigrew,” Montague corrects. “Peter Pettigrew.”

* * *

Marcus is dropping his change into the tip jar on the counter of the coffee shop in the downstairs lobby, craning his neck, rolling it back and forth—as if that’s gonna do jack shit to alleviate his tension headache—while he waits for his caramel latte.

Cho Chang is in front of him.

Or—behind him, technically. In line. But in front of him, like, physically, because he’s stepped aside and moved away and it’s her turn to order.

She has on a skirt. Knee-length. Tapered. Gray. Flats, not heels. Her blouse is a summery peach color. Sleeveless. Floaty. Neatly tucked-in. She smells like flowers and vanilla beans and sunshine. Marcus is cataloguing all of this in somewhat of a hyper-focused daze that he chooses to blame on all the sleep he didn’t get last night and all the caffeine he hasn’t had enough of this morning.

He also wants to state—clearly, concisely, for his own personal record, just so there aren’t any stupid misunderstandings—that he has _not_ been in love with Cho Chang since high school.

He remembers her, yes. Yeah. Duh. They were in the same district-mandated health class in tenth grade and she was really fucking obnoxiously goddamn nice about not making fun of him when his voice went all San Andreas squeaky on him in the middle of his presentation on gonorrhea. He had braces that year. His parents were finalizing their second divorce. He was not having a good time.

And Cho Chang was pretty.

And Cho Chang was popular.

And Cho Chang was smart and sweet and so secretly, surreptitiously _sharp_ —jagged edges hidden under silky-smooth velvet, like if you just scraped a little harder, pushed a little closer, dug a little deeper—

When Marcus feels like lying to himself, which is often, he can think about all the ways he used to pull her metaphorical pigtails. How he’d flirt with her in the halls, even after she starting dating Diggory, tease her about her dress code violations, her homecoming crown, her objectively, enchantingly dumb pep rally speech for the girls’ tennis team; Marcus was always just a tad meaner than she expected him to be, he could tell, but it took a lot for her smiles to falter. To splinter. To break.

When Marcus doesn’t feel like lying to himself, which is far rarer, when he’s loosened his tie and averted his gaze and swallowed a couple of fingers of his dad’s best scotch, he can think about all the ways he was a fucking coward back then. How he’d avoided her after the accident, pretended not to notice her bloodshot eyes and her tearstained cheeks, how he’d rationalized his behavior—cruelly, probably—by reminding himself that he wasn’t her friend, that she wasn’t his anything, that he didn’t _owe_ it to her to be nicer. To be better.

Anyway.

Cho Chang now works for the nonprofit across the street, a legal defense fund for superheroes who aren’t lucky enough to have corporate sponsors or full-fledged PR teams.

Marcus sees her, occasionally.

* * *

(She still smiles at him.)

* * *

The new intern leaves another squishy little Pokémon stress ball on Marcus’s desk, not that he’s reading into it. This one is pink. Chubby. Wide-eyed. Also Not Pikachu.

“I am _not_ qualified for this,” Montague says darkly, raking his fingers through his hair and glaring fearfully at a stack of unfiled incident reports. “For any of this. You need to—you need to call your dad, or, no, fuck it, you need to call _Malfoy’s_ dad, he gets shit _done,_ I don’t even—what the fuck is a _girder,_ Flint? Huh? A _truss?_ Oh, my god, wait, no, they’re—they go _together?_ Those words? What? Who—why—”

“I was right, by the way,” Marcus interrupts, chucking the stress ball at the ceiling. Watching it bounce. Fall to the ground. “About the SDF.”

“About the—what?”

“They got there first,” Marcus says. He waves his phone at Montague. “They _Tweeted_ about it. About what a _hero_ Black Swan is. They’re representing her. As I predicted.”

“Do I have to include that in my report?” Montague bleats, aghast.

“Fuck your report.”

“No, fuck _your_ report.”

“Yeah, exactly,” Marcus says, climbing to his feet, the polished leather tassels on his loafers glinting in the nauseatingly bright-white corporate light as he kicks at the discarded stress ball. “Fuck my report.”

* * *

Peter Pettigrew was a weaselly, rat-faced, borderline criminal piece of shit. Confirmed. Certified. It could be a coincidence that he was somehow the only casualty at the bridge; karma at work or whatever.

Marcus isn’t convinced.

(Bad guys hardly ever actually get what they deserve.)

* * *

“Oh,” Cho Chang says, staring up at Marcus as he wrenches open the back door of the—he triple-checks his Lyft app—Cavalry Blue 2019 Toyota Camry. She seems surprised. Her lips are glossy. Like soft, supple, impossibly lush mirrors. “Is this yours, too?”

Marcus grunts, blinking carefully. Deliberately. He’s not as awful at this as he used to be. At talking to girls. Women. He’s never gonna be charming, never gonna be able to wink or smirk or communicate solely with a heavy-lidded gaze, not without looking like a fucking lunatic, at least; but he’s mostly, gruffly, proficient. Well within the realm of average.

“Yeah,” he says, half-ducking into the car, only to freeze and awkwardly add, “Unless you don’t want to share? I can order another—”

“No, no, it’s fine,” Cho says, hastily scooting across the backrow seat until she reaches the opposite door. She’s smiling at him. She’s always fucking smiling at him. “I don’t mind. Really.”

Marcus sits down. The lock on the door clicks. He tugs at the creases in his pants, smoothing them out, valiantly trying not to compare the size (very big) and shape (very muscular) of his thigh with the size (very small) and shape (very delicate) of her thigh. Wispy strands of fine black hair are beginning to escape the fancy, complicated bun at the nape of her neck.

“So, where are you off to?” Cho asks pleasantly.

Marcus coughs. “Where am I—what?”

“It’s the middle of the day,” she says, laughing a little. Like windchimes. Like _music._ Like he’s in on the joke. “I have a case to follow up on downtown, with Black Swan, but don’t you—I mean, you don’t leave your office, usually, do you?”

Marcus cracks his knuckles. “Uh, no. No, I don’t usually leave my office.” He considers blurting out his suspicion that the bridge collapsing was just a convenient distraction from, like, an honest-to-god cold-blooded fucking murder, suggesting that maybe Black Swan isn’t, like, _morally_ worth the trip downtown, but Cho might actually agree with him, might actually believe he’s _onto_ something, and that feels dangerous. Overwhelming. Dangerously overwhelming. “I wanted a sandwich, though.”

Her eyebrows pinch together. “A . . . sandwich?”

“Pastrami,” Marcus says loudly. Awkwardly. Desperately. “There’s this deli? With really great—they do pickles. Fresh-baked rye. Sauerkraut. Russian . . . uh, Russian dressing.”

“Oh.”

“You should come? Could come? With me?”

Cho’s smile changes, the edges of it curling up with either bemusement or confusion. “Right now?”

He shrugs, feigning nonchalance. Confidence. Social competence. He should really maybe start keeping a squishy little Pokémon stress ball in his pocket. Not Pikachu. Just in case. Just for shits and giggles. An icebreaker. A lifeline. Whatever.

“If you have time, yeah.”

* * *

(She has time.)

* * *

It’s like a checklist for the world’s most harrowingly cliched rom-com.

An impromptu, spontaneous picnic in a mysteriously empty park? Sure. Why not. Laying his expertly tailored $3000 designer jacket out onto the sprinkler-damp, fire ant-ridden grass and then _sitting on it_ , so Cho’s _jeans_ don’t get dirty—that’s fine. Marcus is a goddamn gentleman. So what if she spills her iced tea all over it? It’s peach-flavored. He fucking loves peaches. Dry cleaners exist.

(She apologizes, profusely, even as they both simultaneously reach out to steady the overturned bottle. Their hands touch. Brush. _Graze._ A hot, berry-pink blush tints the apples of her cheeks. It takes him several tries to adequately clear his throat.)

The next morning, he wordlessly pays for her coffee (large medium roast with room for almond milk) and she playfully retaliates by buying him a muffin (gluten-free blueberry crumble) and he learns that she possesses an almost encyclopedic knowledge of Pokémon characters (she giggles, bright and cheerful and earnest, when he calls them all “Not Pikachu” and he can’t bring himself to be embarrassed).

The morning after that, he accidentally walks her all the way across the street, directly into SDF headquarters, and is so busy arguing with her about why the factual reality of KHL flight risk makes drafting Russian prospects so tricky that he forgets to take a quick look around her office, forgets to zero in on the thick manila folder with the CONFIDENTIAL barcode and the post-it note stuck to the front that reads: BLACK SWAN, forgets his own goddamn name, frankly, when she arches up onto the tips of her toes to press a tentative kiss to the hinge of his jaw. Because she can’t reach his cheek.

His brain promptly goes offline for a while. 

(He wonders what kind of rom-com this is; how painful getting to the happily-ever-after part will be.)

* * *

According to public DMV records, in July of 2009 Peter Pettigrew sold a lovingly restored, cherry-red 1994 Dodge Viper to an unassuming CPA named Amos Diggory, which, according to an untagged Facebook photo album from the following year, Amos Diggory then gave to his son, Cedric Diggory, as a high school graduation present.

The car didn’t last long.

* * *

“You know what I know even _less_ about than bridges?” Montague asks, twirling a marbled green fountain pen around like an orchestra conductor waving a baton. His cufflinks are mismatched. Silver and gold. Still monogrammed. “Huh? Do you?”

“No,” Marcus says, frowning down at the photographs littering his desk. They’re big. Official. A decade old. He probably shouldn’t have them, but favors are favors and blackmail is blackmail and he really had no idea _that’s_ what a fucking prison tattoo looked like. “What do you know even less about than bridges?”

“ _Trains_.”

“Cool.”

“That’s—seriously, that’s it? _Cool?”_

Marcus stabs his finger down, tracing the slightly blurred, matte-finished outline of what may or may not be a middle-aged man’s forearm. “Do you recognize this?”

“A whole-ass commuter train was just _derailed_ over by the pier.”

“Is it a _skull?”_ Marcus murmurs, eyes narrowed. “A snake? A pirate flag?”

“There’s a _dead body_ on the fucking tracks, what are you—”

“Oh, wait, here, it says—okay, it’s a mob thing.” Marcus’s frown deepens. “Why would a guy with a _mob_ tattoo be at a crime scene? With cops?”

Montague barks out a strangled, high-pitched, decidedly hysterical choking noise. Like a seal. “Flint! What the fuck! Black Swan is playing Yahtzee with the Orange Line right now and I don’t give a shit who Professor Plum killed in the conservatory with a Colt M1911—"

Marcus glances up from the photographs. “Wait, what?”

“A Colt M1911 _pistol_ —”

“No, no,” Marcus says impatiently. “There’s been another _superhero_ incident? Involving Black Swan? This soon?”

“ _The train is off the fucking rails.”_

* * *

Little Moscow has exactly seven bakeries.

Marcus picks one at random, orders a white paper bag full of Easter bread and tea cakes, and then goes for a walk. Ostensibly, he’s there to map out the collateral damage from the train crash—figure out a clean-up schedule, prioritize city-owned buildings, make a list of what’s salvageable and what’s not.

Respectfully, fuck that.

He stuffs a tea cake in his mouth, a heavy dusting of powdered sugar exploding like a firework around his fingertips, and then turns left instead of right at the chain-link fence that separates the industrial loading docks from the more commercial sectors of the pier.

The Durmstrang School for Boys is, on the surface, unremarkable. Private. Elitist. Insular. Orthodox. It’s behind a padlocked cast-iron gate and its website is written almost entirely in Cyrillic. They have a boys’ hockey team. A suspiciously high graduation rate. Most of the alumni donors self-identify as “small business-owners” and “community leaders” and Marcus doesn’t need a goddamn calculator to put two and two together, thanks. It’s not like they’re gonna _advertise_ “CAR BOMB MAKING 101” in the fucking course catalogue.

So, Marcus chews the rest of his tea cake.

He thinks about his overflowing inbox.

* * *

(Igor Karkaroff was arrested just the once, in 2002, for public intoxication. He had four tattoos. The coroner’s report only lists three.)

* * *

Cho is the kind of person—polite, adorable, playful—who knocks on wide-open, totally transparent doors.

“Nice,” Marcus says, reaching up to fiddle with the knot of his tie. He internally debates whether to loosen it or tighten it—loosening it would be the more casual, more _seductive_ option, yeah, but tightening it would give him more to do with his hands, and the necessity of that really should not be underestimated. “I can’t see through all that glass, you know, had no idea anyone was here.”

Cho hums, flashing a coy smile, and holds up two round Styrofoam containers fitted with clear plastic lids. “I brought ice cream.”

“Real ice cream?” Marcus asks warily. He’s leaning over his desk, trying to be inconspicuous about how he’s restacking a bunch of Silver Serpent’s subpoenaed tax returns so that they cover up the bridge files. And the train files. And the super-secret Diggory files. “Or that weird, gross, dairy-free soy milk nightmare stuff.”

She rolls her eyes. “That weird, gross, dairy-free soy milk nightmare stuff _is_ real ice cream,” she says, fondly exasperated. “Actually.”

“It’s not, though.”

“It _is_ , though.”

“If there’s no cream in it—”

“Oh, because there’s so much _ice_ in it? Is that a topping?”

Marcus huffs and shifts around in his seat, slouching backwards just enough to really emphasize how big his shoulders are.

Cho’s gaze darts from his chest to his face to his lap and then sticks, lingering, seemingly captivated, on his _hands_ before she bites her lip and glances away. She has on a dress today. Butter-yellow gingham with cap sleeves and a narrow, form-fitting, knee-length skirt. He can’t quite tear his own gaze away from her exposed collarbones, which is—a little fucking _strange_ , even for him, even for how objectively obsessed he may or may not be with her, but—they remind him of something. Her collarbones. They remind him of—birds? Bird bones? Bird wings?

Fragile.

Hollow.

Graceful.

She’s wearing a necklace, too, a skinny gold chain with a stylized amethyst peacock feather pendant.

It doesn’t really . . . match.

* * *

“Yo,” Montague says, cracking open a beer on the edge of his mahogany desk drawer. “I learned a new word today.”

Outside, the sun is sinking in the sky, filtering gradient shades of orange through the half-drawn Venetian blinds on the windows. The generic grocery bag from the bodega down the street is crinkling at Marcus’s feet, the receipt for two six-packs of Corona balled up next to it.

“Proud of you, bud,” Marcus says absently, still staring at the grocery bag. THANK YOU is printed on the front in thick, red block lettering. Crooked. Uneven. “What’d you learn?”

Montague takes a swig of beer and then lowers the bottle so he can inspect the label. Pick at the corners of it. “Well, it’s not so much a _word_ as it is, like, a concept?” He scrunches his nose up. “A business concept?”

Marcus swishes a mouthful of his own beer around, grimacing at the taste, fighting a yawn. A headache. Christ. Fuck. Karkaroff and Pettigrew both worked for the same bullshit tech startup back in the 90’s—their respective periods of employment didn’t overlap or anything, but that can’t be a fucking coincidence, right? Marcus doesn’t get it yet. How it all fits. What Black Swan is doing, what Black Swan is _orchestrating_.

“Yeah,” Marcus says after a few seconds have gone by. “Gotta keep those horizons . . . broad.”

“It’s the loopholes, man,” Montague goes on, taking another swig of beer. “They’re insane.”

“Yeah.”

“Like this—I think it’s a hedge fund, some guy who just wants us to—” Montague shifts around to pluck his phone from his back pocket, scrolling through his emails. “Yeah, he just wants his bid for one of those new skyscrapers downtown to go through faster.”

“Sure.”

“And so he’s using a non-profit shell to donate all this construction equipment—and we need _hella_ construction equipment—so we can clean up the train debris.” Montague pauses. “And the bridge debris.” A second, notably longer pause. “If we just leave it in the water it’ll poison the fish and wreck the ecosystem, I guess.”

“Yeah.”

“Anyway, Riddle’s saving our asses, dude, the SPD is gonna have our balls in the litigation jar for, like, the next fifty years.”

Marcus grunts, and then nods, and then blinks, swallowing a sip of beer so quickly he has to cough and thump his fist against his chest to avoid choking.

Riddle.

_Riddle._

“Wait, _Tom_ Riddle?”

* * *

According to less public police records, in July of 2009 Peter Pettigrew sold a lovingly restored, cherry-red 1994 Dodge Viper to an FBI agent from the Organized Crime division named James Potter, which, according to a militantly scrubbed and illegally restored Facebook photo album from the following year, James Potter then gave to his son, Harry Potter, as a birthday present. The car is currently parked in the detached garage of a privately owned farmhouse in western New Hampshire.

* * *

(Mistakes were made.)

* * *

Marcus isn’t looking at his watch.

Or his phone.

Or the pretentious antique grandfather clock lurking in the far corner of the restaurant, directly across from the coat check. 

He’s been toying with the silverware at his place setting, tracing the grooves in the heavy sterling handles of his butter knife, his salad fork, his oyster spoon, straightening them and re-straightening them and re-straightening them _again;_ there’s a champagne bucket full of rapidly melting ice cubes perched next to the table, and a freshly printed six-course tasting menu resting on his plate. On the plate across from his.

All around him, glasses are tinkling. Voices are murmuring. The lighting is dim enough to qualify as romantic, probably, but not so dim that Marcus can’t see the faint strain of pity beginning leak into the waiter’s expression.

Cho is forty-three minutes late.

Marcus can take a fucking hint.

It’s just as he’s jerkily climbing to his feet, reaching for his wallet, his face flushed and his palms sweaty, way past goddamn ready to toss down however many hundred-dollar bills is necessary to make this all go away, to make this all fucking _stop_ —a tremor rocks through the building.

It’s like an earthquake but worse, deeper, stronger, more localized.

* * *

There’s a scream, too.

(A piercing, haunting, familiar battle cry.)

* * *

Marcus rifles through his dresser drawer, hunting for a clean undershirt, a towel wrapped around his hips and the steam from his shower still clinging to the air, his bare skin—he probably shouldn’t have gone home, not with an ongoing catastrophe, an ongoing goddamn _mess,_ but he wanted a fucking break. He deserved a fucking break. There are not enough squishy little Pokémon stress balls in the _world_ to help him right now.

A knock echoes through his mostly quiet apartment.

A knock that he wishes he didn’t recognize, instantly, instinctually, a knock that he’s sorely, awfully, vindictively tempted to ignore. It’s like high school all over again; like barreling out of homeroom, spitting out a ruined Bic pen cap, and seeing Cho Chang kissing Cedric fucking Diggory against a bank of nearby lockers.

A goddamn gut-punch.

Like his papaya allergy and his acid reflux and his motion sickness all got together and passed his heart around like a fucking hacky sack. Had a fucking party.

Marcus clenches his jaw, bones creaking, teeth screeching, and stomps out of his bedroom, making a beeline for the front door, yanking it open with a curse—a question—a _plea_ on the very tip of his tongue—

His mouth snaps shut.

Cho is there, just like he expected her to be, but she looks—different. Terrible. Her hair is tangled, her eyes are puffy, her face is crumpled and tearstained, littered with dust and gravel and small scrapes. Scratches. Road rash. Like she had an accident. Got in a fight.

She’s wearing a sleek black leather bodysuit.

There’s a mask is in her hands.

* * *

(It occurs to him—belatedly, idiotically—that he was right. He _hasn’t_ been in love with Cho Chang since high school. Or maybe he has been, but not with a version of her that actually exists. Is actually real. He thinks that maybe the hints have been there all along; that maybe those jagged edges he believed he was so special for noticing, for understanding—maybe they were never supposed to be a secret.)

* * *

“The superpowers are a recent development.”

Marcus digs the heels of his palms into his eyes. Scrubbing. Pressing. His phone is a brick in his sweatpants pocket, switched off, set to Do Not Fucking Disturb, the incessant ringing—calls from _G. Montague_ and _D. Malfoy_ and, more terrifyingly, _Dad_ —having become just a little too annoying. A little too much.

“It’s not—it isn’t that unusual,” Cho goes on. Warbling. Quavering. “Latent, um, biological enhancement. Research shows that there’s a significant psychological component to it, and it can be like . . . like cracking a safe. The precise, correct combination of external stimuli can trigger an internal response.”

“Okay,” Marcus croaks. “Okay. So. The superpowers are recent. Your safe was cracked. That’s—okay. What about the rest of it?”

Cho just shakes her head.

She’s curled up on the couch, a navy satin throw pillow in her lap, a bottle of Evian by her feet, Black Swan’s mask lying in a definitely not-forgotten heap in the middle of the coffee table. His coffee table. His couch. _Cho’s_ mask, not Black Swan’s mask, except—Cho is Black Swan. Black Swan is Cho. What the fuck?

“A while ago,” Cho starts, “Silver Serpent—he mentioned something to me, in passing, about Tom Riddle trying to recruit a bunch of them, a bunch of supers, to, um, to work for him. And I didn’t really—I didn’t connect it to anything, not at first, but then I did some research on who Tom Riddle actually _is_ and I—” She breaks off, flinching. “It was an accident. All of it.”

Marcus pinches the bridge of his nose, mind racing. Spinning. “Accident or not, the damage you caused—”

“Oh, like you _care_ about any of that.”

Marcus rears back. “Excuse me?”

“You don’t care about the city,” Cho states plainly. Tiredly. Kind of meanly. “You don’t care about the citizens who get hurt, or the neighborhoods that get destroyed, or the vile, exploitative tax laws that get passed so you can keep wearing Tom Ford suits and— _bickering_ with the SDF. You care about winning. About beating us. That’s it. That’s all it’s ever been about for you.”

Marcus stares at her, something itchy and uncomfortable and fever-hot, throat-numbing, spine-curdling, beginning to grow roots, sprout fangs, make itself at home in the pit of his stomach. He suspects it might be shame, but that’s not an emotion he has a lot of fucking experience with. It feels like humiliation. Tastes like guilt.

“Why are you here?” he asks, instead of acknowledging that she’s just—neutered him. His grasp on the argument. Brutally. Effectively. “Isn’t the, uh, the secret identity thing kind of a big deal? For you?”

_She_ stares at _him_ , then, more helpless than accusing, and he realizes, with a pang, that he’s doing it again. Avoiding, deflecting, rationalizing. She came to him for a reason. She told him all of this for a reason. The reason—it’s irrelevant, mostly, because sometimes it really is about who you know. It really is about who your dad is.

“You’re right,” Marcus says, his voice dry and crumbly, like stale bread. He scoots forward, dropping onto the floor, knee-walking the short distance to the couch and then propping his elbows up on the edge. Reaching for her hand. She lets him take it, lets him lace their fingers together; as soon as he does, the tension bleeds out from her shoulders, even as she holds on to him. Tight. Tighter. “I don’t care about any of those things. I care about _you_ , though, and I need you to—I can help you. I can. I just need you to tell me _how_.”

* * *

Marcus’s whole job is to give a fuck.

(He’s figured out that there’s a sliding scale for that; Cho at one end, civic duty at the other. He’ll always pick her.)

* * *

Fraud.

Manslaughter.

Identity theft.

Kidnapping.

Racketeering.

Arms dealing.

Distribution of banned substances.

Conspiracy to commit murder.

Marcus isn’t gonna do the math, but he’s pretty sure if he did do the math he’d wind up with enough years for multiple lifetimes’ worth of prison sentences. Tom Riddle has been real fucking busy, apparently. Getting him locked up is easy; convincing Cho to let the cops and the press and the presiding judge pin Black Swan’s alleged crimes on Tom Riddle’s alleged web of super-minions—that’s harder.

* * *

A year goes by.

Black Swan rescues a lot of kittens from a lot of trees—which: how do they get up there? Why are there so many? Where do they come from?—and helps a lot of little old ladies cross a lot of roads during a lot of rush hour traffic and plays a lot of pick-up street hockey with Marcus and Montague and a whole fucking super-team of super-powered jackasses.

Cho has a toothbrush in Marcus’s bathroom and a pint of almond milk in Marcus’s fridge. They agree on pizza toppings (olives, pepperoni) and on Christmas movies _(Die Hard)_ but disagree on what qualifies (or doesn’t qualify) as their first date.

Marcus still goes to work every day.

Montague still does the paperwork.

* * *

(Cho is still Black Swan.

Black Swan is still Cho.)

* * *

**Author's Note:**

> [come join me in hell](http://www.provocative-envy.tumblr.com)


End file.
